Hacker News: shezi

New comment by shezi in "U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth"

shezi — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:15:26 +0000

The image referencing "Haussystem Didot" is an example of a catalog not containing the Angzarr symbol in question.

I did not find any evidence for earlier examples in any of the very few scans I looked at, nor does a search through the Google Books scans give any indication for words that seem related to the concept.

This would be such a fantastic find! Could you point out a specific example?

New comment by shezi in "U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth"

shezi — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:53:17 +0000

Neither did I read all these pages nor did I pretend to.

> Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages.

You have linked these two Wikipedia pages[1][2], implying that they confirm your extraordinary claims of how obvious and well-known this symbol is. I could in fact check within a single day that the symbol does not appear on any of the 15 images linked in these pages.

So unless you can produce evidence for your claim that "that symbol was used as a notation symbol in those star charts and azimutal maps?", it is quite disingenuous to expect anyone to take it seriously. Expecting someone else to read "thousands of pages" to confirm or deny YOUR claim makes it even less worthy of consideration.

If you do have actual, material evidence for your claims, everyone in this thread would very much like to see it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didot_family [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_de...

New comment by shezi in "U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth"

shezi — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:11:56 +0000

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment at all. The linked article does not refer to Didot, nor does the Wikipedia page for the glyph in question.

Neither the wikipedia page for the Didot family, nor for Histoire générale des voyages shows the Angzarr symbol, I've carefully checked on all the scans on these pages. In fact, any occurrence of the symbol would pre-date the current earliest known example (1963) by 200 years, and that would be a great find. If you have an actual reference, please let us know!

New comment by shezi in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2024)"

shezi — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 17:12:47 +0000

SEEKING WORK | remote, Stuttgart area, Germany | Python full-stack developer

I've worked for 15 years as a freelance Python/Django developer, in projects both big and small. I've created entire projects myself, including front-end and hosting; and I've integrated in teams in roles ranging from team lead to devops specialist. I have worked with Python, Django, numpy, SQL, JS and Typescript, Angular, Java, C++, Jenkins, k8s, and most everything in-between; in recent years I've started doing work on LLMs and GenAI in general.

If you have an interesting project, email me at j@spielmannsolutions.com and we'll talk!

New comment by shezi in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2024)"

shezi — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 06:24:06 +0000

SEEKING WORK | remote, Stuttgart area, Germany | Python full-stack developer

If you have an interesting project, email me at j@spielmannsolutions.com and we'll talk!

New comment by shezi in "OpenTTD"

shezi — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 07:48:54 +0000

Back when we played the original game, there was a bug that leads to underflow in the money. You had to build a tunnel that spanned the entire width of the map, which would cost just more than 2 billion dollars, underflowing and giving you 2 billion instead. Afterwards, the game was a pure sandbox, and that's the only way I played it as a kid.

Still one of the best games ever!

New comment by shezi in "Mathics: A free, open-source alternative to Mathematica"

shezi — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 13:15:37 +0000

This looks really nice and people interested in mathematical computing should try it out. I certainly will.

Apparently many commenters here do not understand the word "alternative", which means "a thing that you can choose to do or have out of two or more possibilities", and instead take it as "equal in every respect".

The Zen of Python, One-Liners and Being Pythonic – Pat Viafore

shezi — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 19:42:11 +0000

Article URL: https://patviafore.com/2022/03/18/the-zen-of-python-one-liners-and-being-pythonic/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30726591

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by shezi in "Free resources to promote your next startup"

shezi — Sat, 09 Oct 2021 08:11:38 +0000

I love that! Argparse is such an old and boring solution to such a simple problem that we need more like this. And I have hope that one of the solutions will make it into the standard library at some point.

There are some others like yours:

Google's python-fire (1)

Docopt (2), which creates the cli from the documentation instead of the other way around

Click (3)

And my own commandeer (4)

Typer (5)

(1) https://github.com/google/python-fire (2) http://docopt.org/ (3) https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/8.0.x/ (4) https://pythonhosted.org/Commandeer/index.html (5) https://typer.tiangolo.com/

New comment by shezi in "Time to retire the CSV?"

shezi — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 17:50:59 +0000

This is a pet peeve of mine: csv was a bad format already when it was created, because it intermixes data with meta data, ie it uses characters that can appear as either data or control characters, leading to escaping issues. This is in addition to being under specified as to which characters are used as control characters.

It was outdated from the start because ASCII already has specific characters for file, group, record, and item separation. Using this would give broad compatibility and a wider feature set (eg. more than one table in a file) while retaining all the benefits of csv.

New comment by shezi in "Unsong, a fantasy novel where the universe is programmable with Hebrew (2015)"

shezi — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 08:02:10 +0000

If you liked this, you might also like

"Friendship is optimal" (https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal)

And

"the metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (https://web.archive.org/web/20040401174623/http://www.kuro5h..., strongly NSFW)

Both are stories about a singularity that turns the world into a simulation, in which some can program the simulation.

New comment by shezi in "Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?"

shezi — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 05:46:01 +0000

Panasonic has duplex document scanners in various price ranges, starting from about 300 €, and they are all Linux compatible with one sane SANE driver. They scan super quick and easy and work very reliably.

New comment by shezi in "Ulam Spiral"

shezi — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 08:46:08 +0000

Here is one of the most enlightening explanations for these kinds of spirals I have seen by 3blue1brown: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EK32jo7i5LQ

Note that the setup is slightly different,since in that video they plot numbers along their polar coordinates. The results are very similar, since both create spirals with predictable angular offsets.

New comment by shezi in "The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games"

shezi — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 08:11:16 +0000

According to AcoUP, transport cost over land is five times that over rivers, and twenty times that over sea.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...

New comment by shezi in "The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games"

shezi — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 08:01:42 +0000

For a historically accurate overview over how cities actually were, and on how they sustained their size, I recommend Bret Devereaux' excellent history blog: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...

Depopulation of cockroaches in post-Soviet states

shezi — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 14:56:59 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_cockroaches_in_post-Soviet_states#

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27833748

Points: 11

# Comments: 2

New comment by shezi in "Note that I wouldn’t pass the listed minimum requirements"

shezi — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 21:33:00 +0000

When I worked at a small consultancy, we had similar requirements, Masters or higher. I asked our hiring manager (who himself was a 22-year-old student) why they did that. He told me that in any week they'd get 100 applicants, while hiring only about one dev per month. Sure, by requiring a degree they'd weed out a handful of great people, but also literal hundreds of idiots. And while there are idiots with degrees (as evidenced by the 80:1 hiring ratio), the number is apparently much smaller than for the general population.

I did not and do not agree with the practice, but I can also understand why it is in place.

New comment by shezi in "Tips for Better Signup / Login UX"

shezi — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:46:21 +0000

There was a django security issue where password length lead to a possible DOS attack against the server. So now they limit passwords rather arbitrarily to 4096 bytes.

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/sep/15/security/

New comment by shezi in "Supernumerary Robotic Limbs"

shezi — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 05:51:15 +0000

According to the recent article on an extra robotic thumb, people got used to it very quickly. And that one wasn't even controlled by neural link, but by sensors on the user's toes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27218940

New comment by shezi in "Plan2Scene: Converting Floorplans to 3D Scenes"

shezi — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 18:45:27 +0000

You could try RealityCapture, https://www.capturingreality.com/, which is a professional 3d capturing software. It has been free to try since Epic bought it. Unfortunately, you'll need a lot of photos to get reliable 3d models. But playing with it will probably give you an understanding of how hard that problem really is.